Various methods exist for providing support to customers and purchasers of products and services. The types of support typically required by customers include questions about the operation or use of a product or service, questions about a recent or outstanding bill, complaints about a service or product, payment of outstanding bills, and inquiries regarding additional services or products. Customers needing support want a system that is easy to use, fast, reliable, individualized, and personal.
Phone support methods provide customers with individualized, one-on-one attention; however, a customer service representative must be dedicated to each customer inquiry, creating the need for a significant number of customer service representatives and the potential for substantial delays in service when customers are placed on hold. Even after completion of a service call, substantial service representative time is required to generate reports or logs of the service call and to handle any follow-up work. In addition, phone support systems often require customers to step through a multitude of tedious and confusing sorting prompts.
Support methods utilizing telefacsimile responses to customer inquiries have lower demands on customer service representative time and can easily handle frequently asked questions and provide detailed instructions. Such methods, however, are not easy to use and often require the customer to have a relatively detailed understanding of the problem. In addition, these methods are not fast and are not individualized.
Support methods utilizing the internet and e-mail provide similar types of benefits and challenges. E-mail allows a customer to type in the request in any form, and a customer service representative interprets the request and provides the necessary response. Unfortunately, significant delays between an e-mail request and an e-mail response are typical. On-line chats provide a direct interface with a service representative, but still require a larger number of dedicated service representatives and significant post-session follow-up by the service representative.
A customer support method is needed that can easily and rapidly provide support to customers for all types of customer requests. This system would preferably maximize the individualized attention to each customer while minimizing the time demands on each customer service representative. In addition, the customer support method should take advantage of this time spent interacting with existing customers to illustrate and offer additional services and products to these customers.